In recent years, mobile ad hoc networks have received considerable attention due to their capabilities to enable data networking without any infrastructure support. Specifically there are no wires, no dedicated routers, and no immobile network nodes. Since there are no fixed wires, nodes use wireless radios with limited capacity and high loss rates to communicate; since there are no dedicated routers, every node participates in packet forwarding, i.e. every node is a router; since the location of a node is not fixed and nodes can enter and leave the network at any time, the topology of the network is dynamic.
The use of a distributed policy-based network management tool has been demonstrated to provide the necessary self-healing and self-adapting capabilities for managing mobile ad hoc networks. See, for example, R. Chadha, Y-H Cheng, C. Chiang, S. Li, G. Levin, and A. Poylisher, “Policy-based Mobile Ad Hoc Network Management”, Proc. of the 5th IEEE Itnl. Workshop on Policy for Distributed Systems and Networks, June 2004, R. Chadha, Y-H Cheng, C. Chiang, S. Li, G. Levin, and A. Poylisher, L. LaVergne and S. Newman, “Scalable Policy Management for Ad Hoc Networks”, MILCOM 2005, Atlantic City, N.J., Oct. 17-20, 2005, and C. Chiang et al., “Performance Analysis of DRAMA: A Distributed Policy-based System for MANET Management”, MILCOM 2006, Washington, D.C., Oct. 23-25, 2006. Although policy-based management tools contribute to network management automation, they still currently require network administrators to specify management policies. The complexity of dynamic mobile ad hoc networks makes specification of policies and effectiveness evaluation of policies extremely difficult.